LOS ANGELES -- He came to Los Angeles as a kind of reinvention of himself, a one-time whiz kid who in early middle age found himself having been fired as a head coach by not one but two NFL teams.

After his second firing, he caught his breath in the TV booth, working as an analyst while doing a lot of soul-searching about his next career move.

He eventually began to be drawn to the world of college football, pursued some opportunities and, in a case of being in the right spot at the right time, was hired by a big-name school in Los Angeles looking to re-establish its football credentials. And it didn't bother him that he wasn't the school's first or second choice.

Eleven years after Pete Carroll arrived at Southern California and returned the Trojans to the top of the college football world, Jim Mora, whose circumstances are eerily similar to Carroll's, hopes to show USC's crosstown rival, the UCLA Bruins, a path back to football relevance.

Carroll, fired by the New York Jets and New England Patriots and owner of a 33-31 record as an NFL coach, arrived at Southern California to begin his first college head coaching job at 49 in 2001. He succeeded beyond his and the Trojans' wildest dreams, winning two national championships and seven Pac-10 titles and 83 of 102 games overall, though his lasting legacy was tarnished by NCAA penalties for violations that occurred during his tenure.

Mora, fired by the Atlanta Falcons and Seattle Seahawks and 31-33 as an NFL coach, arrived at UCLA to begin his first college head coaching job at 50.

The story lines are almost identical. The personalities are not.

"I see the similarities, but there's no similarity in the person," Mora says. "We are not alike at all. I don't mean that in a negative way. I have a lot of respect for Pete. I like him a lot. I've known him forever. But we're not the same guy."

Yes, well, Los Angeles has noticed that.

At USC, Carroll was outgoing, frenetic at times, playful, chatty.

At UCLA, Mora has been a whole lot of short answers and smoldering intensity.

That's fine with Bruins fans, though, because Mora has produced a 3-0 start, including an upset of Nebraska; a No. 19 ranking in the USA TODAY Sports Coaches Poll entering Saturday's Pac-12 opener against Oregon State and a team that is eminently watchable, a quality that was often lacking during the tenure of Mora's predecessor, Rick Neuheisel, a former Bruins quarterback who just couldn't find a difference-maker at his old position.

Now, with redshirt freshman quarterback Brett Hundley making plays with his arm and his legs and running back Johnathan Franklin giving the Bruins two major stars in the backfield for the first time in a long time, the early reviews of Mora fall somewhere between "great fit" and "miracle worker."

And, really, he's not such a grump.

Classic Mora

He's one of those people who will look you in the eye and convey they care about you, the kind of person who isn't totally wrapped up in himself, who might surprise you by asking something about you.

And his eyes, which might glaze over if you ask him where his team should be ranked or how exciting it is to be 3-0, light up when he talks about being a kid hanging around the college and pro teams that employed his famous father, also named Jim Mora, known most for his 11-year tenure as the New Orleans Saints head coach.

"One of my first memories is being a little kid riding on the team bus when my dad was coaching at Occidental College," he says. "I was always attracted to the environment. I liked to go to practice. I liked to be on the field. I liked to be on the sideline. I liked to be in the locker room.

"From the day I came out of the womb, it's been 100% football. Every meal we've ever been served in the Mora household has been because of football. So there's never been anything else that was of major significance in terms of a vocation."

His father, retired and living in Palm Desert, Calif., has always been a huge influence, more in terms of philosophy than in schemes or strategy.

"His biggest impact on me," Mora says, "has been in things like: How do you function in this role? What things are important? What qualities should you have? How do you treat people? How do you treat players? How do you hold them accountable?

"The importance of discipline and accountability and toughness and integrity and those things -- those are the things my dad has always impressed upon me."

This is classic Mora-speak. Discipline. Toughness. Accountability.

Here's more classic Mora. Instead of holding training camp on UCLA's spectacularly scenic Westwood campus, as had been done in the past, Mora held camp in San Bernardino, an outpost 60 miles east of downtown Los Angeles that is miserably hot in August.

Bear Bryant had his Junction Boys, the survivors of his merciless first training camp as the head coach at Texas A&M in the small and extraordinarily hot town of Junction, Texas.

Mora's San Bernardino Boys might someday be thought of similarly.

In August, the Bruins were hot and sore, dog-tired, occasionally irritable, sometimes miserable.

Now, they say, they are toughened, mentally and physically, and closer to one another than they have ever been.

"It was hot every day, and there was never a practice or a moment in practice that wasn't hard," junior defensive end Cassius Marsh says. "It brought everybody closer together. It got to 110 degrees, I think. Guys got overheated a couple of times. It got guys to push through the mental barriers and just work as hard as they can for as long as they can. I think that's something you can't really teach. That's something I think you have to earn yourself."

Franklin, a 5-11, 195-pound senior who is generating Heisman Trophy talk after averaging 180.3 yards in the the first three games, says words can't adequately describe the camp.

"It was a grind, day in and day out -- one of the hardest, toughest camps I've ever been through," he says. "You had to be mentally and physically ready each day from the time you woke up till the time you went to sleep. There were no distractions. It was just team. We were able to get a lot closer."

This all makes sense on a team coached by Mora. It is, after all, the human connections of the game that drew him to consider a future in college football.

Heading to college

After getting fired by the Seahawks following the 2009 season, he was invited by University of Washington coach Steve Sarkisian to spend time around the Huskies during the 2010 season.

"It's limited, what I could do because of NCAA rules, but I could come to practice, stay on the sideline, go to meetings, basically be a fly on the wall," Mora says.

Then in March 2011, Mora, an avid skier, blew out a knee during a ski trip. This time, Scott Woodward, Washington's athletics director, invited him to do his rehab with the Huskies training staff.

"So basically I spent the next six months, three hours a day, five days a week, with their training staff," Mora says. "I got to spend an amazing amount of time not just with the football players, but with all the athletes.

"And it was just really cool being around them. They'd come up to me and talk to me about things, about life."

"We were constantly communicating," he says. "He was asking me for advice. It made me feel, like, relevant in someone's life, beside my own family's. It was like maybe I had something to offer these kids, that maybe they would listen to me."

He loved the thought of that. Then he started studying up on the college game. Then he started to think who he might hire as his staff if he could get some college program interested in hiring him.

It turns out UCLA, after first turning in a couple of other directions unsuccessfully -- Chris Petersen of Boise State and Al Golden of Miami (Fla.) -- wanted Mora. And it turns out Mora does have something to offer, that these kids will listen.

"He's already done a lot for me as a player and as a man," says Marsh, the defensive end. "He's a great coach and a great mentor."

Senior safety Dalton Hilliard says Mora invited him to his office to watch tapes of former LSU and NFL running back Dalton Hilliard (no relation) playing for Mora's dad's Saints.

"I thought that was really neat," Hilliard says. "He just seems like a really good guy, a players' coach. I can really relate to him. I can talk to him about anything."

Hilliard and the others love that Mora was an NFL coach, a feeling, to be sure, that USC players had when Carroll arrived.

Mora, like Carroll, wants them to get to the NFL if that's what they want and if they're good enough. But it's telling that Mora seems more excited talking about what kind of person Franklin aspires to be than about his elusiveness and speed and more excited talking about Hundley's leadership than about his touch on the deep ball.

Carroll lasted nine years at USC and then went back to the NFL and replaced, yep, Mora as the Seahawks coach. Can Mora replace Carroll as the football king of Los Angeles?

"It would be great to have that kind of success," Mora says.

So far, pretty good, especially compared to Carroll, whose first Southern California team started 1-4 and finished 6-6.

At 3-0, Mora says he's going to do what his father has always advised him to do. You could call this the Jim Mora playbook on football and life: "Just keep your head down and keep working. Keep being demanding. Keep the team on track. Keep focused on the next task."